1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to methods and modeling tools for generating object-oriented class models from business vocabularies, and more specifically to a method and a modeling tool for generating class models that can be used with the Meta Object Facility and XMI Metadata Interchange.
2. Description of Related Art
Business vocabularies are created in order to formalize definitions of words used in business policies, rules and statements. When business systems are automated, there is a need to communicate business facts electronically and to record facts in repositories where repository services such as versioning can be used.
The Meta Object Facility (MOF) specified by the Object Management Group (OMG) provides repository services for objects defined using class models. XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) specified by OMG further provides a means of serializing MOF objects using XML (extended Markeup Language).
It is advantageous to have a technique that can generate class models usable with MOF and XMI from business vocabularies in order to support automated business communication and documentation. Other approaches to building class models from vocabularies have been aimed at creating purpose-based class models suitable for business simulation, but unfit for business communication because they encapsulate information structure at a granularity larger than a single business fact. Also, these approaches tend to be largely manual and manual transformation is usually error-prone. A technique for automatic generation will save time and avoid errors of manual transformation.